Finally, 5 minutes with the Canon 5D mk3 blend modes

June 3, 2015

Over the last couple of years I’ve been experimenting with intentional camera movement and multiple exposures, I have of course been using my trusty Nikon D700 to capture the images and post-processing to do the blending. As you will probably know my experiments began after seeing the work of Chris Friel and Valda Bailey, both of whom primarily used a Canon 5Dmk3 to create their works in-camera. It has taken me nearly 2 years but I finally got my hands on one of these cameras thanks to Damien Taylor who I have just returned from a bit of a roadtrip around Scotland with, along with Andrew Atkinson and Ian Burton – much more on this in future blogs though!

So on the final morning before we packed up our gear I picked up Damien’s new 5Dmk3 and my 10 stop ND filter and had 5 mins play with it shooting the coastal caravan park through the large caravan windows.

Sticking with the the dark blend mode and shooting 3 frames per image I made the following images… Some came out not too bad even on the first try!

Being a big fan of Chris Friel and excited by his soon to be released book “Framed”, I just had to try a cheeky version of a “Framed” image of my own, and this is what came out of the single attempt I tried…

Those 5 minutes with the camera have well and truly made me want to use the camera in this fashion for a much longer period, however there is no way I’m switching now – I would really hope that Canon would add these functions to even just an affordable compact camera, or that other camera manufacturers would add these exact functions – it is only software after all, even if the exact maths might be patented by Canon.